


A Murder in Maine

by tomato_greens



Category: Captain America (Movies), Murder She Wrote
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-21
Updated: 2016-06-21
Packaged: 2018-07-16 11:07:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7265554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“I think you’d better get up here,” Jessica Fletcher said. “There’s been a death. An ugly one.”</i><br/> <br/><i>Steve pinched his nose between his fingers. “Mrs. Fletcher, I—I’d love to help, but I don’t know—”</i></p><p><i>“You’ll want to see this one, I think, Mr. Rogers. </i>Captain<i> Rogers,” she added, and Steve pinched his nose harder as his habitual guilt kicked in. “It looks professional. Frankly, it looks vindictive.”</i></p><p>An upstanding citizen is killed. Jessica Fletcher calls in reinforcements. Meanwhile, the Winter Soldier hunts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Murder in Maine

**Author's Note:**

> Being an adult with profesh obligations got in the way of the deadlines for the Stucky Big Bang 2016, plus also, does anyone besides me actually want to read a Murder She Wrote/Captain America crossover??? Long story short, I'm throwing it up on AO3 piece by piece instead. This takes place after _Winter Soldier_ and doesn't pay any attention to _Civil War_. 
> 
> Many thanks to my doll of a roommate, [hrhelizabethiii](http://hrhelizabethiii.tumblr.com), for all her help. <3

Machines did not sweat. This was how the Asset discovered he was human—a patch of seawater appeared underneath his right arm. He rubbed his fingers through the hair there and lifted his hand to his mouth. Salt. An expanse of shifting gray-green-blue appeared in his mind’s eye. There was a slick line of it down his back. He—imagined?—dipping his fingers into it, the rest of him following, until he was reduced to his component parts. Afloat in primordiality. No; no; this was not a possibility. There was then no reason to think it.  

A shirt would make him seem less threatening. Humans wore shirts.

He disarmed. Dis-armed. As far as metal stumps went, his was suspicious, but usually people glanced past it too quickly to notice more than absence. Their body language told him  _ embarrassed _ , though he never understood the necessity. Some people have arms and some people had arms. Shirts, arms, memories. Same difference.

The Asset stashed the arm and the holsters and most of the bigger guns in a backyard that edged on Route 3 and was otherwise surrounded by pine trees. The property looked astonishingly unsecured, a heartwood fence wrapped around three haphazard acres and a couple of houses. A fine buzzing blue line running under the fence proved otherwise—StarkTech Security, a generation or two later than the last he’d seen it, probably unnoticeable to a human. He recalibrated. Probably unnoticeable to other humans. Luckily he had spent the last two lifetimes learning to break through the unbreakable, so after an hour of fiddling he jumped the fence and headed towards the thickening copse of pines. A hole. The arm zipped into its case. The guns dismantled. Easy enough. He reset the StarkTech on his way out.

He received fewer looks than he expected to during his walk into town, but he remembered that despite the heat, uncharacteristic according to his research, it was early yet in the season and most of the summer crowd was still on their yachts or wintering in other homes. He passed a man who, other than his neon shirt, looked much like the Asset did, longish greasy hair and dirty pants.

“Hey brah,” the man said, raising his hand in greeting.

The Asset imagined grabbing the hand and flipping the man onto his back. The man’s feet were bare and heavily callused. The Asset could probably break his spine. “Hey,” the Asset said.

The man moved on his way out of town. The Asset continued towards the Laundr-O-Land Laundr-O-Mat, which, according to the phone book he’d found decaying on the front steps of the house with the pine trees, was located 468 Cottage Street, Cabot Cove, ME, 04607.

It was cold inside. The air conditioner hummed in a weirdly familiar buzz. The Asset was not fond of the sound. Then the smell of powdered detergent gave him a powerful and unexpected dizziness. He saw in his mind’s eye a thin line, wooden pegs, a dozen white shirts stretched between one window and another. No other context occurred.

“You okay, hon?” said a woman in a denim jacket. She had short hair and a leathery face and brown eyes that rested on his arm for some moments before she looked him back in the face.

“I’m fine,” the Asset responded. He did not want to imagine killing her but he did, one blow to the back of the neck, her body crumpled on the floor. He closed his left hand into a fist and then opened it again. There was a bench with a neatly folded colorful stack on one end. It was strange to see so many colors in one place: saffron and fuschia and turquoise in among the grays and beiges and blacks he was used to. He didn’t want to look away, which was a strange sensation.

While no one was looking he lifted a soft cotton thing from the pile. It was a very pale pink and it looked big enough to accommodate his shoulders. He nodded at the woman in the denim jacket on his way towards the exit. Outside, he tugged the pink shirt over his head.

His stomach made a noise. The clawing in the pit of his stomach was also a strange sensation, but of the many unsolvable human problems the Asset had discovered, this he had at least found the answer to. There was a diner at the end of the street; this, too, the Asset had discovered: nearly every town had a diner, and at least one of them was always open. 

The bell above the door tinkled delicately as he entered. He looked around: an older woman at one table, a man with a potbelly and a balding head behind her. 

The diner was otherwise empty. “Booth or table?” asked the blonde woman at the register. Then she looked at his empty sleeve and at the corner of his neck, where he knew scars spidered up his shoulder and landed just under his left ear. “Why don’t you take a booth,” she suggested.

“Okay,” said the Asset, and sat down in a corner that gave him sightlines out the door and into the kitchen. The blonde woman handed him a mug of coffee. “I’ll just give you a few minutes to read over menu.”

The Asset did not read over the menu because reading anything longer than a traffic sign always made his vision swim and his stomach rebel. He traced a picture of a fried egg. There was a vague suggestion in the very back of his head that once he had been able to read, maybe even liked it. He had no proof, though. It could be a lie. It could have been implanted. There was no way to tell.

Exit. Kitchen. Exit. Kitchen. By habit or more likely by training his fingers scratched underneath the table, looking for bugs. Of course there weren’t any.

Then the man with the pot belly turned around and the Asset’s entire body locked up in anticipatory fear.  _ Paul Krieger alias Somes alias Brzewski _ , his mind supplied, which was not helpful. Then:  _ HYDRA _ , which was.

The Asset felt himself stand up. Oh, he thought. The mission.

-

The Cabot Cove Dine-In was perched on the corner of Main and Cottage, a squat little place across the street from the old Five and Dime. In the eternal travesty of progress, the Five and Dime was now the SunSong Yoga and Erotic Bookstore, but the Dine-In remained as it had been in 1975: booths upholstered in electric blue vinyl, Linda Dennison at the cash register (more wrinkled than she’d been in 1975, but still as blonde), the smell of burnt coffee permeating throughout. One had to admit that the older the Dine-In got, the more of a dive it became. This was precisely why Jessica liked it. She too had begun to sink into herself. 

Her nephew Grady fussed whenever she mentioned her Sunday breakfasts there—“Aunt Jess, you’re too old to head over to that side of the tracks!” Well, let him fuss. The coffee was good if it wasn’t tar and Linda had been at Jessica’s wedding, had known her through Frank’s death and out the other side. Besides, Cabot Cove was full of rough-palmed fishermen and was connected to the mainland by a strip of beach so thin it disappeared in high tide; by Grady’s Manhattanite standards, practically the whole town was the wrong side of the tracks. 

Jessica breathed in the steam from her coffee. Her mother’d always told her it was good for the lungs. 

“Oh, hi,” said someone. 

Jessica peered up through her thick glasses, which had once been an affectation and were now, regrettably, a necessity. The woman was slender and blonde and seemed to be standing in the center of an anxious cloud, not unusual in Jessica’s line of work—in Jessica’s former line of work. 

“It’s Angie,” said the someone. “You know, Sharon’s sister?”

“Sharon’s sister, of course,” Jessica said expansively, though she’d met so many slight blonde women named Angela or Sharon that, to her own surprise, she needed a second look. _Truly_. old age was undignified. Meanwhile, Angie had crossed her arms and cocked a hip, waiting, and clear as day it swam into Jessica’s memory: “Angie Carter! Peggy’s grand-niece!”

“That’s me,” Angie said, and sat down on the other side of the booth. 

“What brings you all the way up here? It’s been, what, a decade?” 

“I’d like to say it’s for pleasure, but I’m afraid it’s about the house.”

Jessica reached for Angie’s hand where it sat on the table. “My God, Peggy isn’t--”

“No, no, she’s still at the Clearwater.” Angie drew her hand back to herself and played with the corner of her disposable placemat, a cartoony map of Cabot Cove that hadn’t been updated since Linda’s hair was naturally blonde. “It’s still Aunt Peggy’s house. But setting up housekeeping between renters and all of that is too much for my mother anymore. And Sharon’s too busy with her career, of course.  _ You _ know how it is.” 

Jessica did not, in fact, know how it was, but one didn’t get far with that attitude. “So the whole thing has fallen to you.”

“It’s on me, now.” Angie’s face crumpled in on itself for exactly two seconds before she clawed her way back to her neutral expression. A Carter after all, then. “I’m not—well, I’m not Sharon.” 

Linda chose this particular moment to set down a new coffee in front of Angie, because she was a kind woman and also because she had the busiest body of anyone in Cabot Cove. “We all love Peggy here,” she said blandly, pouring more coffee in Jessica’s cup and making an urgent face at her. “I’m sure someone would be around who might like to help you.” 

“That’s enough, thanks,” Jessica said acidly, “the coffee’s about to spill on the table,” but Linda was of course right. Everybody in Cabot Cove had loved Peggy since she and her husband Gabe first bought their big green house in 1965. It might have gone badly, as no one from the Cove much liked the summer crowd, but Peggy’s accent was charming and so was Gabe’s Ph.D.; they gave the place a distinguished air.

Angie shook her head a little too quickly. “I couldn’t ask.”

“But I can offer. I need something to do all day now that I’m finally—retired, and I’ve always loved that house.”

“Who doesn’t love that house,” Angie agreed dreamily. Behind her, Paul Somes keeled over dead. 

-

This time of morning, the light filtering through the flowering pear tree in Sam’s backyard was too still diffuse a gray to be really beautiful, but Steve felt a pulse of gratitude for it anyway. The constant unpleasant haze of winter, the way sunlight refracted through cloud cover and icy air until it nearly disappeared, hit him hard; it always had. 

“It’s pretty early to be brooding,” Sam said as he came into the kitchen. His muscles always looked slightly alarming when he wore just boxers and T-shirts: out of place.

“I’m not,” Steve protested, “I’m just—”

“Looking out my kitchen window like Heathcliff’s holding a big bouquet of roses for you?”

Steve furrowed his forehead. “The cat from the funnies?”

“Playing dumb isn’t a good look for you,” Sam snorted, and pushed past him towards the coffee machine. “ _ The funnies _ , Jesus Christ.”

“I’ve never been the literary type,” Steve lied. He looked back out the window, where the snowy heap of petals underneath the tree had not yet started rotting. “Anyway, from what I remember, Heathcliff did most of the brooding.” 

The fridge opened and Steve heard the soft  _ thunks  _ of mugs and a carton of half-and-half being set out on the counter. “I’m not surprised. Cathy struck me as a girl who had her shit together. You want milk?” 

“Nah,” Steve decided. 

“Well, all right, Miss Manners.” Sam poured one mug. Then the next. “I’m not serving you, white man. Tear yourself away from whatever’s happening out there and get it yourself if you want it.” 

“Nothing’s happening,” Steve said, and turned around. “When’s anything ever happening?”

“Nice attitude to start the day. I’m not—I’m gonna go catch the news before Matt Lauer’s stupid face shows up and ruins my morning. You want out, the door’s that way.”

Steve scrubbed his face with his hands. “Yeah, maybe I better.”

“Maybe,” Sam said evenly over his shoulder as he made his way to his living room. The TV hissed on. Steve heard “The kidnapping of American diplomat—” and suddenly needed to get the hell out.

“Have a good run!” Sam called out cheerfully as Steve shoved his feet into his sneakers. 

Go to hell yourself, Steve thought uncharitably, and then immediately succumbed to a wave of guilt. “Thanks,” he yelled back, and then he was out, sliding Sam’s glass door carefully back in place instead of slamming it across its rail the way he wanted to. 

He took three deep breaths. The choked up feeling underneath his collarbone didn’t let up much. He jumped down the staircase and that was better, the heavy impact against the concrete was better; he checked to make sure he hadn’t cracked the sidewalk. He closed his eyes to a slit, just enough to make sure he didn’t step on a kitten or trip into a baby carriage, and visualized his fury leaking out of him each time his feet met the sidewalk. It was pure hocus pocus but Bruce swore by the method, and at least it gave him something to think about besides how much he hated running. 

Soon enough Steve realized he was headed towards the reservoir, though he hadn’t made any conscious decisions about his route. That was fine. It was all fine: the shield hanging unused in Sam’s basement, the Winter Soldier’s ice-cold trail—he had to stifle a hysterical giggle—and that he was obviously getting under Sam’s skin. He let it all out through his sneakers in thick imagined oozes. Goodbye shield, and goodbye SHIELD! Goodbye Winter Soldier! Goodbye Sam! Fuck you very much!

His feet kept pumping him around the reservoir. The dark blue of the water was beautiful, but right now he could barely stand to look at it, its manmadeness, its arbitrariness. There just wasn’t any point. Goodbye reservoir! he thought, and swerved southeast. 

St. Martin’s had a white banner above its massive wooden doors proclaiming to WELCOME ALL SINNERS! A perfect match, Steve thought ruefully, and although he was wearing sweatpants and his mother was certainly rolling over in her grave in shame, he couldn’t fight the powerful compulsion to jog up and try the door. It opened easily enough that Steve was pretty sure he hadn’t accidentally ripped through the lock. Peculiar for the church to be open, though; in 2014, church doors were locked more often than they weren’t, and according to the sign out front there wasn’t so much as a prayer meeting until two o’clock.

Chalk it up to mysterious ways, Steve supposed. He dipped his fingers into the basin of holy water by the front door and crossed himself, feeling vaguely guilty as he trudged up into the pews. He didn’t believe in holy water anymore; it seemed wrong that something so precious as a blessing should become mere habit. But this too was common in 2014, and when in Rome--

Steve used his heel to kick down a kneeling rail. It clattered, too loud in the emptiness of the nave, and he flushed as he dropped to his knees. Habits were habits and good intentions paved the road to Rome at least, so he reached a hand into the pocket of his sweatpants, but he no longer had a rosary tucked inside. He didn’t even wear a St. Christopher medal anymore, not after his was lost somewhere in the dreary slog of 1944. Sometimes Steve wondered if he’d only been a good Catholic boy due to lack of opportunity. 

The light streaming through the stained glass windows turned the shadows between his knuckles yellowish and bruise-colored. A Flemish painting--he frowned--no, Italian, practically Mannerist: folded and elongated in prayer. 

_ I humbly ask you for the courage of my convictions and the fortitude and generosity to see them through _ . His mother had always loved St. Joan and so Steve had too, reflexively, her cleverness, a slight figure armored in her fiery certainty. He always imagined her with a self-righteousness that he’d once aspired to and that turned out, after all, to be the luxury of the young. Then again, Joan had been lucky enough to die at sixteen. Martyrs often were.

He squeezed his hands together and sent his anger out through his fingernails in the same thick oozes. It didn’t work, and it didn’t work. And then he for some reason imagined Joan stepping away from her own saints and into his pew, gathering the ooze up into her lap; his boiling blood abruptly flooded out of him. Steve sat there and the imaginary Joan sat there, lit up by her own fury, safekeeping his.  _ Amen. _

A man’s deep voice and a woman’s higher one started to waft from a transept into the body of the room. Steve braced his palms on his thighs and stood up gingerly, though his knees didn’t creak. They hadn’t for years, of course, but a lifetime’s experience was a lot to unlearn. This was his undoing: the owners of the voices were quicker than expected, and he had only just nudged the kneeler back into place when they rounded the corner.

“Oh,” said the priest, a white man with big glasses and a shock of dark hair. He had a face that had clearly been, about twenty years ago, very beautiful.  “Uh--hello.” 

Steve gave a little wave.

“You okay, hon?” the woman next to the priest asked. She must have been nearly sixty and looked a thousand times more sensible than the priest did, but Steve thought she, too, recognized him by the way her hand was paused with a clawing grip on the priest’s arm, dark brown against his pale summer cassock. He felt suddenly awkward and old-fashioned compared to a woman in deacon’s robes, a priest decked out in white. 

“Casual, baby,” he remembered Stark saying to him once, shit-eating grin underneath his aviators,  “we’re all about keepin’ it caj’ in the future, try and keep up.” Steve had been punched in the face often enough to recognize when someone was acting like an asshole on purpose, but  _ in asshole-o veritas _ . So keep it caj’, Rogers.  

“I’m just leaving,” he said, nonchalant as he could manage. “The door was open, I wandered in....”

“Of course, anything for--of course,” the priest faltered.

“Take your time,” the woman offered, and started hauling the priest back into the transept. “We’re just discussing, um, choir practice.”

“Choir practice,” the priest agreed. “We have two. Choirs, I mean. Gospel and traditional. You could come see them sometime, if you--they win awards!” he finished, a little desperately.

The woman made a terrible face and pulled on the priest a little harder. As usual, what Steve needed to do was get the hell out of there, so he patted the pew reassuringly on the corner--stupid, stupid; pews didn’t need comforting!--and waved again, said, “Have a nice day, folks,” and scrammed. 

Joan, at least, had done her job. He wasn’t mad anymore.  _ Thanks _ , he sent upwards, because even overwhelming doubt engendered by a lifelong existential crisis was no reason to be impolite. 

The walk back to Sam’s felt exponentially longer now that it was fueled by shame rather than adrenaline. His inevitable apology loomed like the sword of fucking Damocles, but it was necessary and it was his own fault.  _ Sorry I’m an asshole _ , he practiced, then grimaced. Suck it up and take responsibility for yourself, Rogers.  _ I’m sorry. I overreacted.  _ Better, better.

He jogged the last mile, an easy pace, ramping himself up to hop up Sam’s front stairs and let himself in the house. Sam was still parked on the couch, though the TV was off and his eyes were closed. His mug was balanced precariously on his stomach, and Steve couldn’t stop himself from plucking it out of Sam’s hands and placing it on the coffee table. “Sorry,” he whispered, just in case Sam was faking it. He was a good actor, better than most. “I overreacted.”

No quickening of breath that Steve could hear. No shifts. 

Steve’s phone, angled on the counter where he’d forgotten it that morning, buzzed gently against Sam’s formica countertop and let out a shrill, plasticky “You go talk to your friends, talk to my friends, talk to me!” Steve glanced at the screen: a 207 number he didn’t recognize. Where was 207, anyway? “We- _ ee _ are never, ever, ever getting back together!” Probably a telemarketer. Even Captain America’s private line wasn’t free from this particular scourge of the 21st century.

An itch under his hair that he had registered in the back of his awareness suddenly became insistent. He scrubbed his hands through his hair and came away doused lightly in sour-smelling sweat. Unusual for him, but he supposed occasionally typical bodily processes happened even to science experiments. He tried to picture walking up the stairs and taking off his clothes, turning the taps until the water finally stuttered into warmth, and found he couldn’t. He stuck his head under the kitchen faucet instead.

“You go talk to your friends, talk to my friends, talk to me!”

“Aw, for God’s sake, Steve, you still haven’t changed that?” Sam groaned from the couch. His voice sounded muffled, like he’d pulled a pillow over his face. “I can’t believe you’re personally torturing me just because you want to convince Tony Stark you don’t know how to work modern technology.”

“We- _ ee  _ are never, ever, ever getting back together!”

“I’m getting it, I’m getting it,” Steve muttered, taking the cleanest-looking dish towel and dragging it over his head. The rough terrycloth caught on the patch at his left temple that for the first twenty-three years of his life was acne-scarred. 

“Steve, pick up your damn phone before I drop it in the toilet.”

His hand scattered little droplets of water on the phone’s screen cover as he snatched it up. The 207 number flashed again, though at this point Steve was more afraid of Sam’s whining than a telemarketer asking for an autograph. “Hello?” 

“Steve?” said a woman. 

“Who is this,” he said, suspicious despite himself. 

“Angie. Angie Carter,” she answered in a shaking voice. 

“Oh—Angie, how are you? I don’t have this number saved. I thought you were trying to sell me an insurance policy.”

Angie coughed out a wet laugh. “I barely have enough insurance for myself. But—oh,  _ Steve—” _

Steve felt his face harden and his vision narrow. “What happened?”

“Nothing! Nothing happened. Not to me. But—someone else. Someone’s been killed.”

_ Oh God, who now?  _ Steve wanted to ask. He didn’t. “You’re all right? Did you know them? Who was it?”

Angie made a strange inarticulate sound, like maybe her breath had caught in her throat. The phone clunked a few times.  “Mr. Rogers?” an entirely different voice asked. “This is Jessica Fletcher, one of Peggy’s friends. You might know me as J. B. Fletcher,” she added with some authority, although Steve didn’t recognize the name. “One of our local citizens has been killed.”

“I’m so sorry,” Steve said automatically. “Though I’m not sure—you must be in Maine?” He’d seen pictures of the summer house and been too swallowed up in a poisonous jealousy to pay much attention, but he thought it was Maine. Cove Something. “I’m not sure what I can do from down in D.C.”

Sam stomped into the kitchen and waved his hands in front of Steve’s face.  _ Who is that?  _ he mouthed. Steve waved him off.

“I think you’d better get up here,” Jessica Fletcher said. “There’s been a death. An ugly one.”

_ “ _ Steve _ ,”  _ Sam hissed.

Steve pinched his nose between his fingers. “Mrs. Fletcher, I—I’d love to help, but I don’t know—”

“You’ll want to see this one, I think, Mr. Rogers.  _ Captain _ Rogers,” she added, and Steve pinched his nose harder as his habitual guilt kicked in. “It looks professional. Frankly, it looks vindictive.”

Sam sighed and crossed his arms and slumped down in other kitchen chair. He had his disapproving face on, the one that made Steve’s skin feel too tight, like he was in his new body for the first time again and it was too big to control. 

“Frankly, I appreciate your concern, Mrs. Fletcher, but don’t you think you’d better leave this to the police?” 

“I don’t know that our local forces, however noble in their intentions, are equipped for this crime,” she said acidly. “And I’ve been around a long time, Captain. This sort of knife wound takes an unusual and particular skill.”

“Listen—Angie can help you if you need it, but the Avengers have a tip website and I can make sure this gets to the top of the pile—”

The phone clunked again. “Steve, please come up here,” Angie asked, and Steve thought about the picture on Peggy’s bedside table, Peggy with gray curls and deep smile lines, Angie a swaddled pink bundle in her arms, and he found himself nodding helplessly. 

“Okay,” he said, “okay. I’ll see what I can do.” 

He swiped the phone screen to end the call and looked over at Sam. “Sorry,” he said.

“What are you sorry for?” Sam asked, clearly unimpressed. 

Steve felt the morning’s fury shore up in his chest again. He forced it back down through the legs of the chair and into the tile floor, spreading until it dissipated into the house’s foundation. “I’m sorry that I overreacted this morning,” he said evenly. “And I’m sorry I couldn’t answer you just now.”

“Congratulations, you’re getting better at this.” Sam uncrossed his arms and leaned forward, and Steve pinched himself hard on the inside of his thigh to stop the whole mess from spilling out. 

“Well, I’ve never been the best multitasker.”.  

“Tell me something I don’t know. C’mon, Steve—who was that?”

“Angie Carter—”

“Carter?” Sam asked, and his face was so immediately, genuinely concerned that Steve let go of his thigh and lifted his hand as a comfort, or a barrier. 

But he spilled it after all: the niece, the friend, the gruesome death. “Angie’s friend said it looked professional. And Angie asked. So—”

“Don’t tell me you’re actually going, Steve—”

“She  _ asked _ , Sam—”

“And are you thinking of Peggy or Angie? Tell me that, at least—”

“I know she’s not Peggy—”

“Do you? Do you really? Or is this like Sharon all over again—”

“Christ, Sam, Sharon and I didn’t even—it wasn’t anything—”

“I don’t know if you’ve realized this, but here in 2016 we have working eyes—”

“And apparently they see things that aren’t there—”

“You’re not being rational! This isn’t functioning,  _ Cap _ —we just get back from Europe and you’re already high-tailing it off just in case someone you barely know maybe saw something—”

“Someone I trust, and as if you can talk to me about rational when you’re an adrenaline junkie—”

“I am  _ not _ , that’s pretty rich coming from  _ you— _ ”

“For God’s sake, you haven’t been to work in—how long? Because you can’t get enough of Tony Stark’s toys—” 

“Funny, I didn’t exactly hear you say that when I was helping you out—” 

“Which I never asked you to do—” 

“You asshole, of course you did!” Sam shouted, the whites of his eyes showing all around, and Steve clammed up. 

Sam sucked in a breath through his teeth and let it out again. “I’m going to take a shower. I think you’d better head out again for a little while.”

“I’m going to Maine anyway. I’ll be out of your hair in,” and Steve checked his watch as ostentatiously as he could, “a couple of hours.”

“Lucky thing you barely unpacked, then,” Sam shot out, and slammed the bathroom door shut behind him. 

**Author's Note:**

> come chill with me on [tumblr](http://tomato-greens.tumblr.com) or visit my frankly less embarrassing [fanblog](http://tomatowrites.tumblr.com), which is also on tumblr.


End file.
